There are countless retail merchants that now offer products or services for sale over the Internet, and which deliver physical merchandise to customers in response to orders placed over the Internet. As this type of business—also referred to as “e-commerce”—continues to expand, advertising over the Internet will continue to play an increasingly large role in what products are actually purchased by web users. One concern about such on-line advertising is the extent of its effectiveness. Advertisers constantly seek better and more efficient arrangements for determining how effective an advertising campaign has been, so as to allocate their advertising budget in the most appropriate fashion.
There are currently several advertising schemes that are employed to measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign on the Internet. One scheme, that endeavors to accurately estimate the effectiveness of an ad campaign, is the use of coupons. In this scheme, a visitor to an advertising website selects a hyper-text link corresponding to a product or offer, and prints out on a printer attached to her computer a corresponding coupon. Typically, this coupon bears the name of the product, the offer made by the merchant and an identifier that identifies to the merchant which advertising website the coupon was printed from. The merchant then redeems the coupon by making the sale to the customer. The merchant is able to track the number of times a customer visits an advertising website and elects to purchase merchandise from the merchant by the number of coupons received. However, this scheme requires the customer to physically travel to the merchant's store or business in order to redeem the coupon, thus eliminating the advantages of conducting business on the Internet.
One way to avoid traveling to a merchant's store is to provide e-coupons for on-line purchases. However, such an arrangement still does not measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign accurately. For example, the campaign sponsor may not have enough information as to the type of viewers who looked at the advertising, and circumstances in which those who viewed the content, proceeded with using the coupon.
Another advertising scheme that is employed on the Internet to determine the effectiveness of an advertising campaign is the use of click-through advertising banners on a particular advertising website. The advertising website may be any publisher website, such as the homepage of an Internet service provider. A click-through banner is a display message that is linked via hyper-text markup language (hereinafter “HTML”) to the website of the merchant displayed thereon. For instance, an advertising banner located on one website may display an advertisement for a product such that, when a web user currently using the website clicks on the advertising banner, the user is connected to the website of the merchant. A revenue is typically paid by the merchant to the advertiser depending on the number of times that the merchant's site is visited via the advertiser's click-through banner.
This scheme of advertising may be unsatisfactory for many advertising campaign purposes. For example, the scheme has not proven effective in generating user interest—click through rates for banner advertisements fell from 2.0% in 1998 to 0.15% in 1999. Furthermore, the scheme does not differentiate between visits that are successful, i.e.—in which a purchase is made during the visit, and those that are unsuccessful. By failing to provide this information, the scheme is economically unpredictable, in that the cost to the merchant of the advertising is not necessarily proportional to the revenue generated by the merchant by sales to click-through customers. This scheme also does not differentiate between a “human visit”, in which a person or potential customer is viewing the site, and a “computer visit”, in which an advertiser employs a traffic anonymizer to generate a large number of customer-less click-through visits. A traffic anonymizer prevents the merchant from determining the originator of a click-through visit.
Another problem with current merchandising campaigns on the Internet is that once merchandising content is distributed to an advertiser, the merchant loses control of the content. In other words, the merchant cannot readily modify the merchandising content without obtaining the cooperation of the advertiser to discard the old merchandising content and to embed new merchandising content on a timely fashion. Furthermore, this scheme creates an incentive for an advertiser to lure web users to click the advertising banner while visiting the advertiser's website. For instance, if unbeknownst to the merchant, an advertiser displays a false advertising claim in the advertising banner connected to the merchant's website (e.g.—the banner reads “FREE CD's” when in fact the merchant is not offering free CD's), visitors to the advertiser's site may be misled into using the click-through banner. In this case, the merchant will pay the advertiser for receiving a visit which generates bad will rather than a sale.
Therefore, there exists a need for a system and method that provides an improved scheme for web advertising and provides a dynamic control over the contents of the advertising campaign.